Book Review: The Jane Austen Book Club

I'm going to be straight. I've never read any of Jane Austen's stuff. Or seen any of the film adaptations. I tend to be drawn to more contemporary stuff most of the time. However, after reading Karen Joy Fowler's book The Jane Austen Book Club, I have a feeling that within the next year or 2, I'll end up reading Austen's entire works.

In this book, Fowler has created 6 very real, very emotional characters who start a book club devoted entirely to the work of Jane Austen. Grigg, Jocelyn, Allegra, Bernadette, Prudie, and Sylvia each choose their favorite book, and then host the club to discuss it. The club meets once a month. However, this book does not simply study the characters as they discuss literature. Rather, it makes connections between Austen's books and the lives of these 6 modern people. Each of the six sections delves into the personal life of the host that month.

I especially enjoyed that the sections were not completely distinct from one another. Fowler was able to delve into the relationships by the characters, and by Sylvia's section (the last in the book), the plot has come around so that the section looks at all six characters, and the way they interact with Sylvia, who is in the process of divorcing her husband throughout the book.

My personal favorite character was Grigg, the only man in the book club. While he is not the most complex character in the story (there seems to be a six-way tie for that title by the end of the novel), he is, in my opinion, the most interesting. I loved the flashbacks to his childhood and the story of why he was invited to join the book club in the first place, despite the fact that he had never read Austen. As a science fiction reader, he is initially shunned from the group, and this tension ensures that all of the main characters have to grow as individuals throughout the book, as they gradually learn to accept him - and, in some cases, even give science fiction a second chance.

I enjoyed the book immensely; however, it is one of those reads that is hard to WANT to pick up sometimes, because there is not a lot of suspense. Also, despite the fact that the six sections create a novel, they almost read like a collection of short stories in the beginning, so it becomes easy to walk away from the book for a few days and not feel like you're missing any information. Of course, as the reader gets further into the book, this begins to change - the characters become more interconnected, and the book begins to focus more on present events than independent stories from the characters' pasts. It took me a couple of weeks to get through it, but I'm glad I finally did.


Details:
Publisher: Plume; Reprint edition (May 3 2005)
ISBN-10: 0452286530
ISBN-13: 978-0452286535

Average customer review (from amazon.ca): 3.5/5